The Lovely Red Fox: DIY Tree Skirt

This year as I was gearing up for decorating our house for the holidays, we realized that this was the year we were going to take the plunge and get a legitimate sized Christmas Tree. This was a big day! What kind of tree should we pick out? Pre-lit? Unlit? With or without snow?!

Well you can probably surmise from the first photo of this post that we went with a snow flocked tree, so no secrets there! We ended up getting our tree online and lighting it ourselves incase the lights ever burned out. Yay, we had bought our first 'real' tree (in the sense of size, not live!)!

Next I realized that we would need a bigger tree skirt as well. And being the super picky person that I am, I realized while perusing the aisles upon aisles of Christmas explosions at Target, that I am so particular that I wanted to make my own tree skirt >.< !

There were two super beautiful ones out there that I loved, one from the OpalHouse line at Target, and another one from World Market, but I wanted something that kind of melded the two styles together.

Enter: Lindsay makes her own tree skirt.

So if you're crazy like me and feelin' crafty, come along and I'll show you how I made mine.

Materials

First you'll need to gather some things:

— 1.5 yards of 54" Bump Cloth from your local fabric store
— Merino Wool in whatever color you would want your felt balls to be, as well as felting tools (You're gonna need a bunch if you want to do this by hand [heads up, this takes some TIME], or you can purchase ready made balls online here)
— 3 ft of lace ribbon for the tree skirt ties
— Roughly 31 gold beads or sequins of your choice
— Needle and thread
— Patience and your crafting hat!
— Scissors
— Sewing Machine

Step 1: Cut Out Your Fabric / Hem Your Skirt

First I cut my fabric into a 52" circle. I happened to have a rug that was exactly that size, so I used that as a stencil, but if you're finding yourself without one of those, you can use a measuring tape to mark out a perfect circle with some fabric chalk or even a pen (just trim off any visible marks/ cut on the inside of your line!).

Next, find the center point for your circle, and cut out about a three inch circle in the middle.

Then cut one straight line, making your skirt into a cape-like shape so you can have an entry point for getting it around your tree.

When all of these cuts have been made, take your skirt to the sewing machine and create a hem all around the edges of your tree skirt.

Step 2: Make and Attach Your Felt Balls

As mentioned previously, you can order pre-made felt balls on Etsy, or you can felt your own by hand. I previously made a post about five years ago on how to make felt balls... the initial purpose of the post was that I was going to make a whole rug out of them, but that never quite came to fruition. So at least the post can serve as a how-to on needle felting!

I spaced my felt balls out about 4 inches from one another, and used 40 felt balls.

To attach them, I used a needle and thread to tie them onto the edge of the tree skirt. I threaded the needle all the way through the skirt and the felt ball multiple times to make sure they were secure before tying off the thread.

Step 3: Add Some Decorative Beading

For the beadwork, I marked spots off with pins in a circle at 4 inches and 10 inches from the edge of the skirt. I chose to have the inner circle beads be a little more weighty than the outer ones to add visual interest. These I also just sewed on by hand with needle and thread.

Step 4: Add Lace Ties

For the lace ties on the skirt, I cut three pieces of lace ribbon, and spaced them out evenly along the tree entry slit. For each tie, I made a small incision with scissors about an inch out from the hem on either side of the entry slit, and threaded the ribbon through, to tie the bows on top!